As a professor of Southern and African American studies, I am angry and sick at heart but not surprised at the state lege’s actions. I testified against last year’s slate of Don’t-Say-Gay laws and the smugness, arrogance, and condescension of the people gleefully wrecking our bottom-tier education system as some kind of moral crusade has to be seen to be believed. I don’t know how, if systemic racism doesn’t exist, they explain their own dynamic: a virtually all-white ruling cartel ignoring and taunting a virtually all black minority party (that actually represents majority state interests) amid a mortuary landscape of monuments to unjust wars, slavers, and segregationists. It seems anyone with an ounce of self-awareness would feel shame. But the statehouse is filled people who need to be white/right. And the supermajority of power they have built while people who knew better slept has me terrified for my grandchildren’s future.
As a professor of Southern and African American studies, I am angry and sick at heart but not surprised at the state lege’s actions. I testified against last year’s slate of Don’t-Say-Gay laws and the smugness, arrogance, and condescension of the people gleefully wrecking our bottom-tier education system as some kind of moral crusade has to be seen to be believed. I don’t know how, if systemic racism doesn’t exist, they explain their own dynamic: a virtually all-white ruling cartel ignoring and taunting a virtually all black minority party (that actually represents majority state interests) amid a mortuary landscape of monuments to unjust wars, slavers, and segregationists. It seems anyone with an ounce of self-awareness would feel shame. But the statehouse is filled people who need to be white/right. And the supermajority of power they have built while people who knew better slept has me terrified for my grandchildren’s future.